In December I received confirmation that my session submission to MVPDays Online had been excepted. So I duly recorded my session and send it across to the team to pull together for the actual event. Pre-recording a session was a new experience for me, to be honest it was actually quite hard to present without a live audience, either in person or listening in. It's a skill I need to practice and do more off. I'd like to get a better microphone setup to more presentations...

If you are active on Twitter or LinkedIn you'll have seen a flurry of posts from people around the world posting that they have passed an exam/earned a new badge from Acclaim. And it's great to see, but if your not one of them and pondering why you should take an exam or what exam you should take keep reading!

Why You Should Get Certified

Over the last eight years of my career I've always been encouraged to get certified with my past employers and over those years I've sat 17 exams. It ta...

You often hear services within Azure labelled as Private Preview, or Public Preview or General Availability (GA). But what do these labels actually mean and especially in relation to support or pricing.

Private Preview

Private Previews are generally the first release of a product and customers are invited to try the service to help provide feedback, to understand if the service is something that is needed as well as help to shape the future of the product.

As I'm sure you are aware Microsoft have changed their certification paths for Azure and Microsoft 365, the main announcements came at MS Ignite in September 2018. The focus now is on role-based certifications. Which has meant a whole slew of exams within the Azure certification path and we are now starting to see new exams and certifications paths come out for Microsoft 365. More information on the exams can be found here.

In my day job I often take customers through demos of our products, we have some pre-canned demos available to use as well as some demo environments but there are some gaps and we have to built our own or find other methods of showing off the products. Three products I talk about often are Azure Backup, Azure Migrate and Azure Site Recovery. I've pulled together a few environments for each over the past year and then ripped them down again, which takes alot of my time. But over the last f...

As I'm sure you are aware Microsoft have changed their certification paths for Azure, the main announcements came at MS Ignite in September 2018. A lot of the exams they announced have been in beta and over the Christmas holiday most of the exams were made live. A lot of changes and even a new exam was announced. If you haven't heard about the new certifications Scott Duffy (b|t) has made an excellent video explaining it all:

My Journey

For those that follow my blog you will know...

]]>
Azure,Microsoft,Exams,Study,Certificationhttps://techielass.com/passing-az-102Tue, 29 Jan 2019 06:00:00 +0000A month of Parkrunshttps://techielass.com/a-month-of-parkruns
A few years ago I used to run, all the time. I was part of two running clubs and some weeks I'd run 5km, other weeks I'd be doing upwards of 15km. I loved it, it was hard but fun and rewarding. I even did some 10k runs in order to put all that training to hard work. Unfortunately I then broke a toe in my left foot and things fell of course. The toe took what felt like ages to heal and once it had I'd been out of the routine so long it was impossible to get back into it.

However, in Septem...

]]>
Balance,Fitness,Community,Healthhttps://techielass.com/a-month-of-parkrunsSun, 27 Jan 2019 06:00:00 +0000Azure Meetupshttps://techielass.com/azure-meetups
When I started looking for an Azure Meetup/User Group back in 2017 I struggled all I managed to find was the UK Azure User Group which was in London, which wasn't ideal as I'm based just outside Glasgow! Since then there has been an explosion of user groups formed, in England and Northern Ireland which is great to see!

From this map overview you can see where the groups are located and below I've listed more information about each group and linked to their ticketing system.

Scotland

I recently received the confirmation email that I will be speaking at the first Experts Live Norway event in Oslo, Norway later this year. This is super exciting as this is the first speaking acceptance I've had for an international conference. I've never been to Norway, so this will be my first trip!

Experts Live Norway is part of a global network of conferences and communities, there maybe an event near your - https://expertslive.org/

A year ago today I was on my way down to Reading for my first day as a Microsoft employee!!! I still pinch myself that my childhood dream of working for Microsoft has come true!

Over the Christmas period I was writing my look back over 2018 for this blog - My Review of 2018 - and I've recently been writing my internal review (Connect) at work as well, so I've had a lot of reflection time lately. The conclusion I've come to is, I've grown so much as a person over the last year, through t...